James Hannah - The A to Z of You and Me

She pauses a moment, and sits down in my visitors’ chair, unhurried, offering all the time I need.

‘Listen. No one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to do. I’m not. Dr Sood’s not. But I’ve seen a lot of people go through what you’re going through. Every day. I don’t want you to do it the hard way.’

‘No.’

‘And it’s only a light solution, OK? It will ease the anxiety. It will ease the symptoms. It’ll stop you worrying. Give you a bit of space in your head.’

‘Right.’

‘So let’s pause a moment, OK? Let me get your blanket for you.’

‘Yeah.’

‘In here, is it?’

‘Yeah.’

She fetches it from the cupboard and helps me draw it around my shoulders. I hook my fingers through the knots.

‘I tell you what, I’ll make you a deal. You take this now, and I’d say by late this evening the effects will have worn off. So, I promise to come back to you this evening, and if you don’t want it, you won’t have it ever again, and that is my absolute solemn promise, OK?’

‘OK.’

OK.

‘Are you ready?’

She takes up the bottle, and carefully charges the spoon, and proffers it.

‘Down the hatch.’

Down the hatch.

Tighten fingers, clutch through crochet. Feel the knots.

‘Now a sip of tea. It’ll take the taste away. There.’

Sip.

Cup rings back into saucer.

‘All right?’

‘Right.’

‘OK.’

‘Is there anything else I can get for you? Your wish is my command.’

‘No. Thank you.’

LIPS

YOUR LIPS. The most delicious kisses.

Oh, when I remember your lips.

Lying back here now I long to think of them, but — I can’t.

The perfect pout–

I’m scared to even begin.

Can’t even bring myself to think — to think of the kiss–

No.

Think about it differently. Lips. What was that first kiss?

The first ones were grandma and grandad. Grandad’s was always over-slobbery and beery. Laura used to hate it. I remember every time she would cringe on the way in. I used to quite like the smell of stale beer. Quite fruity.

But I shrank away from grandma’s kisses. She had thin, dry lips, cold and without resistance, like the kiss of a ghost. But the worst bit was there must have been this one-off piece of stubble or something on her top lip, a little to the left of centre — it must have been where she regularly plucked out a hair because every time I had to kiss her goodbye I would be pricked by it, like a little electric shock.

I can’t believe how she put up with me writhing to get away from her, whingeing, There’s a spike on her lip! It hurts!

What must the older generations put up with?

First serious girl kiss: Nicola Peterson.

Aged fourteen, out in the middle of the school playing fields, far away from anyone.

The lunge that girl used to make. The first thing I would see would be this great wide chasm of a cakehole launching itself at me like it knew what it was doing. For a while I thought maybe it was me who was getting it wrong. I didn’t know, did I? Because no one really teaches you how to kiss; where would you start? You have to make it up as you go along.

Her kisses frightened me. That’s not right, is it?

Kelvin thought it was hilarious, but he’d never kissed anyone.

There were four or five in between, all bases reached, virginity merrily dispensed with, but it really was you who taught me to go back and love kissing.

No.

No — I can’t. I can’t unlock it. It’s too — I’m scared to. It might release it all again, just be too much. Too, too much.

Here comes the cavalry.

I venture into my mum’s bedroom, where I’m not really allowed, and find her sitting on the edge of her bed, gazing into her mirror, a collection of make-up shrapnel slithering in beside her on the eiderdown.

Twenty minutes since Laura slammed the front door behind her and left the house shivering, Mum still seems sad.

She sees me — ‘Hiya, bab’ — and her mouth automatically straightens into a smile, but for once she can’t sustain it, even though I smile back.

She is very sad.

She unclicks her lipstick lid and twizzles out the waxy stick, and aims it at her mouth. But before she sets it to her lips, she sighs and lets her hand drop back into her lap.

It’s on instinct that I step forward and reach for the lipstick myself. She lets me have it, still twizzled out.

Delicious smell. One of my favourite smells.

I reach up towards her mouth, and she turns her face towards me to oblige. I begin to apply, top lip, and then bottom lip, in vague imitation of what I’ve seen her do more or less every morning of my childhood. And like more or less every drawing of my childhood, I go over the edges.

And I know I’ve gone over the edges, so I keep going. And Mum keeps her face there. She keeps it there until I’ve drawn a big smiley lipstick face almost all the way up and out to her ears. As I apply the lipstick, the skin of her cheeks is stretched out sideways, and I worry it might be painful, but she doesn’t move, and I need no more encouragement than that.

When I have untwizzled the wax and slipped and clicked the lid back into place, she turns and looks at herself in the mirror.

She smiles, a small smile in the middle of my great big one.

It’s still possible to smile when you’re crying.

In the dark, unfamiliar pitch-black lips press themselves passionately to mine. Not like yours. Different to yours. They open, and my lips open, open together, drive deeper, a tongue pushes between m–

No. No. I can’t think of this.

‘Are you all right, lovey?’

Sheila, doorway.

Her voice is like — it’s like listening to the radio when I’m falling asleep.

Somehow clearer, more acute.

‘How are you bearing up?’ She’s speaking slowly too.

‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘good.’

‘Well, I’ll check in on you in a little while, see how you’re going on. You’ve got your button if you need me.’

I look at the button. There it is, snaking across my bed. Friendly.

‘I’ve got my button.’

‘OK, lovey.’

She’s not there any more.

Is this working? I think the morphine might be working.

It’s gentle. I feel gentle.

It’s like sitting in the back of the car, the voices and the radio around me, swirling and stirring me to sleep.

Muscles

‘OUR CONCERN IS over muscle wastage,’ the consultant mutters to your mum.

Plastic mask marks your face.

Bedbound, the ventilator breathes out, you breathe in; clicks; in, you breathe out.

A ventilator is not a part of the body. It absolutely is not.

Brainbranded.

We’ve been sitting with you for two days now. The ventilator breathes out, you breathe in; clicks; in, you breathe out.